There are many contexts in which it is desirable to have a coordinated (e.g., an aesthetic and/or attractive) display of otherwise basic product packaging elements, and the like. For example, a bookshelf can be filled with books having different heights and widths, different types and designs of bindings, etc. While some bindings can be attractive, many are not, or the overall collection has an uncoordinated or non-cohesive appearance. Similarly, a store display can include product boxes of one or more products in stacks or other layouts. In these and/or other contexts, it can be desirable to use the visual portions of the packaging (e.g., of the product boxes, book bindings, etc.) to form an overall coordinated display field, while accounting for the geometry and layout of the product packages.
A number of traditional techniques have been used to spread a single image across multiple surfaces. In some traditional approaches, highly tedious and manual techniques are used to design multiple packages as a unit (e.g., for a multi-volume work, like an Encyclopedia). More recently, computer systems are used to cut a source image into pieces (e.g., tiles), which are assigned to a particular package surface like a mosaic. These approaches, however, are limited in a number of ways. One such limitation is that the approaches tend to be fixed to a particular installation—the approaches provide no way to dynamically adjust parameters to accommodate a new source image, new target package geometries or layouts, etc. For example, if above approaches are used to spread a design across the outside bindings of multiple book volumes, appreciable effort would be involved in reapplying the design to even a slightly different set of books. Another such limitation is that traditional computational approaches typically operate in only one or two dimensions. For example, an image can be tiled across the outside surfaces of a number of packages in a single plane. However, there tends not to be any consideration of a third dimension to the packaging, a third dimension to the display field, empty space in the display field, etc.